Making Space for Change
Oh heck yeah! I think I’ve succeeded in creating a flavorful, salt-free bouillon substitute that is off-the-charts nutritious. Add a teaspoon or two to any store-bought or homemade broth, or use a tablespoon in 12oz of water (and salt to taste) for instant broth.
Burdock, astragalus, dandelion leaf, celery leaf, kale, garlic, turmeric, and ginger. Just what your body needs to rebuild.
This one is available in the store, and also in the upcoming holiday gift boxes!
Cooked fruit is a tasty and healthy winter treat. It’s basically a winter smoothie – minus the shock of cold that your stomach really doesn’t need this time of year. You get all the vitamins, fiber, and pectin in a much easier-to-digest format than raw fruit. I especially love this one during the gray days of winter – the bright lemon flavor wakes up my tastebuds!
The last three months or so, I’ve been reading about and doing a lot of “active recovery” activities. While reconditioning after my long bout with respiratory infections and adrenal fatigue, I realized I really needed to restart exercising without overdoing it and just making myself more tired. The two concepts I’ve found to be fruitful as I look into this are Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Active Recovery .
I wanted to share some things I’ve found helpful. Maybe you will, too. Remember: I am not a doctor; talk to yours before you start. There are some conditions, such as Myalgic Encephalopathy or “ME,” sometimes called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that can be made very much worse by trying to stage back in exercise. So please be careful.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) refers to the amount of time between your heartbeats. If your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute, that doesn’t mean your heart beats exactly one time per second. The time between the first two beats may be 1.00002 second, then .99998 second, then 1 second, etc. The amount of difference the time between your heart beats is your HRV. There are actually a bunch of different measurements that go into an HRV number, but that’s the basic idea.
Generally speaking, the higher your HRV is, the healthier you are. There are apps and devices that let you measure this easily at home. I’ve found tracking at my HRV scores to be very helpful in showing me how my body is doing, including:
I’ll go into more detail on these later.
Once I was able to get a handle on what I needed (rest/recovery/training), I needed to figure out activities for each of those needs. Rest is pretty easy – read soothing books and sleep a lot. The other two are harder, because they can overlap.
Enter “active recovery.” This is the idea that very gentle exercise can be more beneficial than straight rest in certain circumstances. I found a lot of work on active recovery coming from athletic trainers. They are generally working with healthy people who are trying to take their performance from “very good” to “exceptional,” so I take their specific training regimens with a huge grain of salt. But their guidelines have been working well. The super-short version is, when you do active recovery, you want to keep your heart rate between 50-70% of your maximum heart rate (or “Zone 1 and 2”). For me, that’s between 88 and 125 beats per minute. (HR zone info here.) For other kinds of training, you aim for higher zones. I use a heart rate tracker and app while I’m exercising so I can target the right zone. It’s actually pretty hard to stay in the recovery zone, because when I’m tired, sitting at my desk and going to meetings can put me in or above the recovery threshold! No wonder I was having trouble overdoing it…
The other piece of recovery training is that breathing is incredibly important. I’ve come to appreciate yogic breathing and meditation in a whole new way. Likewise, body alignment and energy flow activities have also been super helpful.
Tune in for tomorrow’s installment where I’ll go into agonizing detail about those. 🙂
For background, see Adrenal Recovery, Pt. 1
One batch of veg-heavy soup – 2 quarts
In 2016-17, I was pretty sick. It started with pneumonia and got worse from there. At some point, my doctor diagnosed me with adrenal fatigue – basically, I’d been stressed out for so long my adrenal glands couldn’t keep up their usual endocrine dance. Some people debate whether adrenal fatigue is “real” diagnosis, and I’m not interested in arguing. I do know that by following these suggestions, I did feel better, and when I didn’t, I felt much, much worse. It took me about 2 years of alternating small improvements and plateaus to feel mostly healthy.
There’s a lot of material out there about the condition, and if you think you have it, I hope you’re working with a health care provider. What I want to do here is share the guidelines I followed and the recipes I relied on so if you are going through the same thing, you don’t have to expend your limited energy finding recipes.
As always: I am not a doctor. Your mileage may vary. Listen to your body and your health care provider. The guidelines my doc gave me were:
Keeping blood sugar steady is incredibly important. For me, this is what it took to not let my blood sugar crash:
I also figured out two years into this that I had a gut full of candida, which was making it very hard to keep my blood sugar steady and to sleep through the night. So, when treating that, I also added the usual anti-candida rules:
You may or may not have this issue.
Of course, it takes energy to feed yourself well, and that’s just what you don’t have. So having a plan help. When possible, I’d prep this stuff once a week:
And then dinners were from this list, which I keep adding to under the tag “good_carb”. I’m going to sort/link some specific recipes in my next post.